The Furious Dogfights of George Lucas' Red Tails

Visual effects supervisor Craig Hammack tells Popular Mechanics how his team—with a little help from producer George Lucas—created the ultrarealistic dogfight sequences between World War II planes in this new film about the Tuskegee Airmen.

In limbo for nearly 25 years, Red Tails—George Lucas' sweeping aerial epic about the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II—finally hits theaters today. Red Tails spends much of its time in the cockpits of P-51s as the Airmen fight and dodge their way through a flurry of fire. And because Lucas spent a quarter century and millions of his own dollars to bring to the movie to life, it's no surprise that his team obsessed with getting the World War II–era details just right.

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"There's historical footage everywhere," says visual effects supervisor Craig Hammack. "You can watch old John Wayne movies that were shot with real airplanes. So people have a general idea of the capabilities of the planes, and how to tell that story and stay true to those dynamics is a challenge."

The visual effects team started its research by analyzing historical footage and flight simulator games to get a good understanding of P-51 flight dynamics. Then Lucas called in Ed Shipley, an acrobatic pilot of P-51s, to help. "He's an absolute expert," Hammack says. "And so he was always made available to talk through dynamics of the scenes." The actors who portrayed Tuskegee pilots also studied with real surviving airmen to learn how they controlled their planes.

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On set, the crew built cockpits—and, in some cases, entire mocked-up planes—for the actors to sit in. To get the jumpy, jolted look of 1940s combat, the crew relied on a hand-operated gimbal—a platform equipped with extenders that crew members could hold and manipulate. "The thing about these planes, especially in the first part of the movie, is that they're supposed to be kind of just buckets of bolts up there," Hammack says. "You want a little bit of shimmy, a little bit of unexpected rattling kind of going on." The hand-operated gimbal delivered this kind of imprecise, organic movement perfectly, and it was faster to use, too.

Back at Industrial Light & Magic, VFX artists replaced everything in the cockpit except for the actor and the seat—the guages and switches you see are digitally created. "Reality is not always as exciting or as good-looking as you would want," Hammack says. "The thing about the mockup planes and even the real planes is that they're very functional, which means they're very sparse, and they're built for function. And it ends up looking not as realistic." But even more important was that in order for the shots to look realistic, animators had to have completely control of how the light played in the cockpits. "One of the really recognizable things about aerial photography is the play of shadows across everything as you maneuver," Hammack says. "You're typically up above the clouds or in the clouds, so you get really pure light direction. In real photography, you don't always have the ability to control light to simulate the high-speed maneuvers in the air. So we chose to replace it all so that we could get the right kind of light kicks and emphasize the action more." Making sure the finished result was photo-real was incredibly important. "You couldn't let the audience even begin to think that the cockpits might be CG because they show up so much throughout the movie," Hammack says. "It would have taken viewers out of the story."

When it came time to build VFX sequences for the dramatic aerial battles between the Red Tails and the Germans, Hammack's team faced a unique challenge: making the dogfights feel fast-paced and exciting while keeping the dynamics of the planes true to life. "Dogfights in movies are always tricky because these days we have a video game culture," Hammack says. "Things need to move faster than they normally would to keep your attention. So it's a little bit of a struggle, design-wise, to keep the action very fast-paced and to keep 14-year-old boys entertained while still showing that these planes built in the '40s are kind of lumbering machines and only have a certain amount of maneuverability."

And Lucas challenged his team to stay true to history. "I think that some of the initial Star Wars space scenes with the X-Wings and the TIE Fighters are based on World War II footage, so he's had a lot of experience studying it," Hammack says. "It was very important to him specifically to get the speeds right. There were times where we would push it beyond and he would say, 'You know, you guys are making it exciting but you're starting to break the reality of what the planes could do, you know, so just dial it back a little bit.' "

The final result was dogfights that floored real Tuskegee airmen. At a panel for the film, Hammack sat next to one of the airmen while filmmakers showed the dogfight footage for the first time. "You could see him almost maneuvering the controls in his seat," Hammack says. "Afterward he told me that it felt very, very real to him, and that was a huge compliment."